The present invention is directed to an inoculum tray and more specifically to a tray having a plurality of grooves connected to a common reservoir through control orifices to facilitate uniform distribution of a test reagent from the reservoir to the individual grooves with sufficient concentration to facilitate pick up of the reagent by pipettes or the like.
With conventional transfer dishes such as a generally flat shallow petri dish it has always been a problem of achieving uniform distribution of the liquid reagent due to the nonwetting characteristic of the plastic used in their manufacture and the surface tension effect of the reagent. In order to achieve uniform distribution it was often necessary to rock the dish back and forth which could present a dangerous handling situation depending upon the nature of the reagent.
In addition to the problem of non-uniform distribution, the use of shallow, flat bottom dishes also created a transfer problem when it was necessary to transfer the liquid reagent by means of pipettes or the like from a flat bottom dish to a multi-well test plate as a micro-titer plate. Due to the shallow depth of the liquid reagent, it was difficult to achieve a uniform pick-up of the liquid reagent by means of a multi-tube pipette device.
In order to overcome the foregoing disadvantages it has been proposed to provide one or more depressions in the bottom of a dish at the point of pick-up or to provide a plurality of inter-connected troughs to minimize waste surface area. However, the problem of even distribution to the recesses or troughs still created a problem.